Fast Company

The Wi-Fi industry wants to bring you better, cheaper gear–maybe

While mesh Wi-Fi systems can saturate every corner of your home in speedy wireless coverage, they’re also expensive and mostly proprietary. Prices for these systems start at around $250–more than three times what the average consumer spends on a wireless routerp–and if you want to switch to another router maker’s software and services, you have to replace the entire system. Recently, the Wi-Fi Alliance announced a wireless standard called EasyMesh that’s supposed to solve these problems.

If America really wants to drain the swamp, take a good look at AT&T

If you know anything about AT&T’s history, its relationship with Trump’s personal attorney Michael Cohen shouldn’t be too surprising. The company has an army of lawyers at its disposal, is hair-trigger litigious, and is no stranger to backroom dealing in the Capitol. During 2017, the company paid $16,780,000 to 31 lobby firms, according to government filings. 

Municipal Broadband: Urban Savior Or Gentrification’s Wrecking Ball?

The case for city-operated broadband is compelling. It offers comparatively fast service. It’s celebrated as a means by which to preserve net neutrality.

At F8, Zuckerberg reiterates Facebook’s commitment to election integrity

Mark Zuckerberg kicked off his keynote by explaining Facebook’s plans to protect the integrity of elections in the United States and abroad. He also recapped moves the company has made to boost transparency in election ads–things like requiring anyone buying a political ad produce government identification to prove they are who they are, and requiring that political ads on Facebook have a higher degree of transparency than print, radio, or TV ads. That, of course, is meant to get in front of Congress’s proposed Honest Ads Act.

25 years ago, the web opened up and the world changed

On April 30, 1993, CERN—the European Organization for Nuclear Research—announced that it was putting a piece of software developed by one of its researchers, Tim Berners-Lee, into the public domain.  That software was a “global computer networked information system” called the World Wide Web, and CERN’s decision meant that anyone, anywhere, could run a website and do anything with it. In an era when online services were still dominated by proprietary, for-profit walled gardens such as AOL and CompuServe, that was a radical idea.

Zuckerberg keeps insisting Facebook doesn’t sell our data. What it does is even worse

When Zuckerberg was questioned about the company’s handling of user data and how it essentially handed it off to third parties, he demurred. “For some reason, we haven’t been able to kick this notion, for years, that people think that we sell data to advertisers,” said Zuckerberg. “We don’t.”

How Amazon Helped Cambridge Analytica Harvest Americans’ Facebook Data

Facebook has been rocked by reports of a massive data scrape carried out by Cambridge Analytica and one of its then-contractors, a Cambridge University academic named Aleksandr Kogan. Kogan claims that the data he collected from thousands of Facebook users and their friends—amounting to data on over 50 million users—abided by Facebook’s terms; Cambridge Analytica promises it deleted the data; and Facebook is auditing everyone it can for signs of the data. But while Facebook provided the original data, it wasn’t the only vehicle for Kogan’s app.